The present invention pertains to portable kits used to administer medicine, and, in particular, to a portable kit including an inhaler for pulmonary administration of medicine.
In order to manage a variety of medical conditions, such as diabetes, patients often must self-administer their medication. For patients leading active lives, these medications frequently must be carried around by a patient for administration on the go and without the direct supervision of a health care professional.
The use of an assortment of different types of inhalers or inhalation devices is known to pulmonarily deliver inhaleable medications. To allow a user to conveniently carry around an inhaler, various cases have been developed. One such carrying case is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,833,066. The case includes a counter mechanism manually operable by the user to keep track of the number of doses dispensed from the inhaler storable in the case, such as a metered-dose inhaler. While the manual counter mechanism may be beneficial with a metered-dose inhaler, in which a canister with a large supply of doses is initially loaded, in that it helps a user gauge when that large supply is nearing exhaustion, the counter mechanism offers little if any reminder as to when the last dose was taken, and further the case does not organize additional medicine to be administered by the inhaler in such a way as to serve as such a reminder or indicator of the last taken dose.
One known portable kit for parenteral administration of insulin employs a reusable injection pen which can be stored when not in use within a complementarily shaped internal hollow provided in a clamshell type case. The interior of the case also provides separate hollows adapted to accommodate replacement needles for the pen, as well as a replacement cartridge, which cartridge holds multiple doses of medicine and is loadable into the pen when the medicine in the replaceable cartridge already loaded in the pen is exhausted. While useful for treating diabetes, this kit is not useful for pulmonary delivery of medicine, nor does visually observing the way the replacement cartridge is arranged in the case offer any indication of when the previous dose may have been administered.
Other carrying cases have been developed to hold packages of medicines, such as child-resistant containers intended to be loaded with blister packs. Furthermore, known ways of packaging medicine include providing instructions on the medicine's packaging and associated with blister packaged doses of that packaging. Alternate modes include removable labels on the packaging and associated with blister packaged doses of that packaging which can be applied to a calendar to remind a user to administer a dose. However, if used with a system for inhaleable medicine delivery requiring administration via an inhaler, the combination of case and packaging designs may require a user to separately keep track of the inhaler, which, if it becomes separated from the medicine, can be at minimum, inconvenient, and at worst, hinder appropriate compliance.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide a system that overcomes at least one of these and other shortcomings of the prior art.